WSJ: The King of Big Data

On the Wall Street Journal website today, Ben Rooney posts an interview with Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler, co-creator of Hadoop. For all those in the big data space, the Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing, and Hortonworks is focused on accelerating the development and adoption of Hadoop.

In Rooney’s interview, Baldeschwieler describes the problem Hadoop is designed to solve:

At its base, it is just a way to take bulk data and storage in a way that is cheap and replicated and can pull up data very, very fast.

Hadoop is at one level much simpler than other databases. It has two primary components; a storage layer that lets you combine the local disks of a whole bunch of commodity computers, cheap computers. It lets you combine that into a shared file system, a way to store data without worrying which computer it is on. What that means is you can use cheap computers. That lets you strip a lot of cost out of the hardware layer.

The thing that people don’t appreciate when you drop a lower price point is that it is not about saving money, it is about being able to do an order of magnitude more on the same budget. That is revolutionary. You can score five to 10 times more data and you can process it in ways that you can’t imagine. A lot of the innovation it opens up is just the speed of innovation. You get to an answer faster, you move into production faster, you make revenue faster.

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I currently serve as Vice President of Decision Science at CenturyLink. I've previously served as a leader in the Advanced Risk & Compliance Analytics (ARCA) practice at PwC and as Director of Data Science & Analytics Engineering at Areté Associates. I've served the public as Chair of the Thousand Oaks, CA Planning Commission. I have been married to my wife Stephanie since 1993, and we have a wonderful daughter Monroe. Learn more about me »

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